If you want to buy a book, first the dog has to approve you. If you smell okay, this little store in Lucca, Italy, might sell you a copy of
Panchine: Come Uscire dal Mondo senza Uscirne by Beppe Sebaste, a lovely book of meditations on the subject of park benches (
panchine) and how to exit the world without really leaving. Beppe looks like your grandfather and is the kind of guy you want to sit down and have a beer with - on a park bench, perhaps, while playing a game of chess.
The epigraph at the front of the book is a quote from Richard Brautigan:
Why is a short story short?
Ask that man sitting on a bench
in the park, any park, but be prepared, for he might
tell you a story longer
than you would want to listen to.
Beppe did me the honor of reading a passage from my
Le Famose Patate to an audience in Piacenza, Italy. It was a passage about hitchhiking in an old pickup truck banging across the fields of Illinois. Maybe thoughts on the bench seats in old pickups are an American equivalent to meditating on a park bench in Italy. The last lines of the passage were:
"You got kids? How many?"
"'Leven."
"Eleven! Wow! How do you feed them all?"
"With a spoon. Haw haw."
Haw haw. A good answer to an impertinent question. Of course the children would be fed. As we bounced between the fields of America in a dirty old farm truck, I had no doubt that the children of this land would always be fed.
But he used these words:
"Hai figli? Quanti?"
"Undici."
"Undici! Cacchio! E come fai a dargli da mangiare?"
"Col cucchiaio. Ah-ah."
Ah-ah. La giusta risposta a una domanda impertinente. Certo, vuoi che non desse loro da mangiare? A mano a mano che avanzavamo sobbalzando tra i campi d'America nel vecchio camioncino sidicio, mi si stemperava ogni dubbio: i gigli di questa terra avrebbero avuto sempre qualcosa da mangiare.
from Amazon, click 
